By Sarah Hogle

“You’re implying that I’m not presentable in public unless I have a full face of makeup on.”
“No. I absolutely did not imply that.”
“I suppose I should take three hours to curl my hair, too, right?” I make my voice tremble. I am the victim of horrendous misdeeds. “Because I’m not pretty enough the way I am? I suppose you’re embarrassed to bring me around your family unless I conform to society’s impossible beauty standards for females?”
His eyes narrow. “You’re right. Your hair’s an embarrassment in its natural state and your face is so anti–female beauty that if you go out like that, I’d insist on you walking backward and ten feet away from me. I want you to go upstairs right now and paint yourself unrecognizable.” He arches his eyebrows. “Did I do that right? Are those the words you’d like to put in my mouth?”
My chin drops.

**DNF at almost halfway through. I’m am going to pause on this one until I can get it from the library on E-Book. The narrator was good, and I liked Naomi’s snarky humor. But I really could not take any more of how unreasonable, petty, mean, and silly she was. I started off liking and sympathizing with her, but the more I learned about her, the less I liked her. I couldn’t remember what Nick did that was so terrible. It’s true he didn’t stand up to his heinous mother, but she could have tried to help him with that. But she was too busy being wimpy herself when faced with her. Also, the whole premise of the book was flawed and didn’t make sense. I need to reread the first part to try and understand her hatred of Nick and skip ahead a bit to see if it gets any better. And you can’t do that with an audiobook.

***update July 18th, 2020*** I finished this book on kindle. It got much better a little past where I quit it last month. Naomi and Nick finally started to work together and appreciate each other and teamed up against his heinous mother. Their confrontations with her were epic if over the top. Deborah is truly one of the worst mothers of all time: the quintessential villain you love to hate. Unfortunately, she kind of disappeared with over a hundred pages to go and took a lot of purpose and air out of the plot. There was some closure needed there. Also, Naomi and Nick became a little more likable as some information was shared which made them more understandable. All in all a pretty funny chick-lit novel, but nothing more substantial than that.

July 18, 2020